I discovered Erlang in the late 2000s via its kinda weird and iconic video "Erlang the Movie" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrIjfIjssLE that prompted me to dig further. I was at the time an average developer. Erlang, and Joe Armstrong books and videos, made me understand things that other web-oriented languages ( Ruby, PHP... ) never really dug into at the time. Because the Erlang ecosystem is more than distribution. Distribution is a consequence of its design around concurrency and message passing and let-it-crash/auto-healing philosophy. Erlang, and after that Elixir, made me think differently about code and made me a better programmer.